


As You Wish

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Big Brothers, Boundaries, Brothers, Drug Use, Gen, Healthy Boundaries, Little Brothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 05:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1293070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is likely to prove a bridge story, in between "The Buddy System" and a longer sequel I'm working on. In "Buddy System" Lestrade had suggested to Mycroft that it was time to stop trying to manage Sherlock's life. This follows that line. </p><p>Timing is important, IMO. This is canon compliant (by at least one interpretation) and up to date as of S3E3 "His Last Vow." Sherlock has started using again, as he had in "Vow." Given what happens in Vow, it seems plausible he's not yet stopped. I'm avoiding the issue of Moriarty/pseudo-Moriarty. I'm...thinking about that. John's married. Sherlock's alone, and out of control. This is Sherlock at his worst and brattiest, with few if any checks, and no desire to placate Big Brother. Be aware that this is not any of the possible versions of "nice" or "vulnerable" Sherlock: it's Sherlock as the snotty, accusatory, venom-tongued Tasmanian Devil he's capable of being. There may be a follow through story where Sherlock rediscovers his admittedly rare and unreliable inner nice-guy. It's not here, and I'm not about to pretend it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As You Wish

 

“Of course I use drugs. How else am I to stay sane? You don’t know what it’s like,” Sherlock snarled. “Surrounded by idiots. Trapped by the ordinary. You have no idea.”

Mycroft gave him The Look—reproving, slightly incredulous. “Sherlock really! Of all people to try that on… me? Me?!?” He snorted, delicately—but it was still a snort. “I’m hardly the one to sympathize with your monumental self-pity. If anyone understands, it’s…”

“No.” Sherlock rounded on his brother. “No. You don’t understand. You can’t understand. You’re ‘the smart one.’ You are what you are naturally. You’re not the one with a brain bent up like a pretzel trying to think in five more dimensions than your mind is fit to manage.”

Mycroft, prepared for Sherlock’s more common claims of his vast excellence compared with the entire universe, came to a screeching halt. “What?”

“You heard me,” Sherlock snapped, eyes narrowed. His posture was just short of aggressive, as though given even a trace of encouragement he’d leap at Mycroft and slam him against the wall, twist his arm the way he had only months before, over Magnussen. “Fine. I’ve admitted it. All these years and I’ve admitted it—you’re the smart one. I’m the idiot. Do you have any idea, Mycroft, what it is to spend your entire life trying to turn an idiot into a genius?” He stopped then, and gave a hollow, artificial laugh. “Oh, no. Of course you do. ‘It’s simple logic, Sherlock.’ ‘Preponderance of the evidence, Sherlock.’ ‘If you’d just focus, it would be clear, Sherlock.’ ‘Do try to keep up, Sherlock.’ Thanks to you I understood the meaning of ‘logical fallacy’ by the time I was seven.”

By the time Sherlock was seven, Mycroft had pulled him out of the river twice, taught him to read, held him when he cried, put sticking plasters on his knees so many times he’d actually found himself wondering if he was intended to become a doctor. He’d talked his brother out of trees too tall for him, led him into trouble almost—but not quite—too desperate for Mycroft to get them back out of. He’d got them lost in the woods twice, and in London on secret train trips into the City four more times…and managed to get them unlost again each time. He’d mastered the fine art of winning squabbles with a sulky, loud, sometimes violent younger brother (mostly a matter of studied silence, refusing to rise to bait, and cutting insults…).

Most of all he’d poured forth everything he knew and understood about how to process the world’s infinite complexity. He would continue to do so for years to come. Indeed, he thought, staring at his little brother, he had never stopped.

It had never occurred to him to stop. So much of his genius was—had to be—something that could be passed on, after all. Had to be. It was…logical. It was a matter of observation, deduction, building logical structures, spines of coherent connection. It could be taught.

If it could be taught, how could he deprive his brother of the techniques? How could he leave his brilliant baby brother without the tools to someday, maybe, join Mycroft on the same plane of understanding?

“You do quite well,” Mycroft offered, tentatively.

“I bloody crippled myself, you mean,” Sherlock snarled. “I might just as well have been trying to make myself fly by beating my arms. I ended up with a brain like an overdeveloped weight lifter and I still can’t match you on the worst day you ever had…and, yet, I’m stuck with the boredom and the annoyance and so help me, everyone else is so _stupid_. So lazy. So much they could do if they’d only make an effort, but they bloody don’t, do they? The lot of them go blundering around in a daze looking at the pretty lights and colors and gasping about how the clouds all look like dinosaurs. And I’m stuck, too smart to enjoy the light show and too stupid to keep from getting bored, **_bored_** _, **BORED!”**_ He leaned in toward Mycroft, his face a lion’s mask of rage. “You never get bored, though—no. To you it’s all interesting. You live like life’s a jet from a fire hose, and all you really need sometimes is less, not more. What is that like, Mycroft? What’s it like being so fascinated by it all you have to retreat to turn it off? What do you do? Generate fractal equations to track dust motes in sunbeams? Predict the frequency of cricket chirps based on estimates of the ambient soil temperature? Meditate on the developing criminal propensities of babies in their prams at Hyde Park? What is it like to never run out of interesting things to think? Tell me. I’d really like to know.”

Mycroft’s mouth opened and shut, silent, and he realized one way Sherlock’s talent had always exceeded his—an area where he’d always felt inferior to his brother. Sherlock never seemed to lack for words, or hesitate in his speech. He swallowed, and gathered himself, offering reflexively what he had always offered.

“I could teach you. It’s really just a matter of focus and—“

Sherlock shrieked, then—starting down at the growling, gravely bottom of his range and working up, until he was up in his upper register and sounded just like a whistling tea kettle at full-boil. Mycroft scrambled backward, then froze, forcing himself to collect his wits, forcing himself to deal with life—as he always did.

“Sherlock Holmes, stop this behavior this instant!”

Sherlock cut off, staring at him. Then he gave a challenging cock of his head, and stood suddenly to hyper-attention, like a caricature butler or a WWII cartoon of Der Fuhrer. “Sieg Heil!” He pulled his long face even longer, and drew his lips into a turtle-mouthed frown. “Der Britisher Goffernment Hass Zpppppoken!” One arm shot out, palm down, pure Third Reich militant, all the way through.

Mycroft, frustrated, found himself falling back through the years to his twelve-year-old self, trying to maintain some kind of control over the wild little brother entrusted to his care without the authority to actually accomplish anything reliable. It would be several more years before he got his growth spurt and out-massed Sherlock by enough to really enforce his demands… for years he’d had to attempt control using only threats, deviousness—and, when desperate, pure force of will.

He was down to force of will. He stomped one foot, furious. “Sherlock, stop it. Behave like an adult, just once, you terrible little brat!”

“Shan’t,” Sherlock sniffed. “And you can’t make me.” Then he grinned, the coldest, most evil grin he’d ever grinned in a long, long history of evil grins. “You can’t, you know, Mikey. You can’t make me. Can’t make me quit, can’t make me stay clean, can’t make me behave. I’ll do whatever I wish, and you can’t do a thing about it.”

Mycroft closed his eyes, remembering Greg Lestrade’s recent suggestion he stop trying to manage Sherlock and just “let him go.” Part of him argued, frantically, that now of all times he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t abandon Sherlock, now. Not if he loved him. If he really loved his baby brother—really, really loved him—wouldn’t he walk into hell beside him, arguing every step of the way into the inferno?

The rest of him, though, stood with a remembered Lestrade, and asked what good he thought he was doing, aside from providing Sherlock with just the audience he wanted—just the fall guy and straight man he yearned for.

“Leave me alone, Mycroft,” Sherlock growled. “Let me go to hell on my own. I’m a big boy, now. Leave me with my twisted brains and my nasty habits…at least they’re my own. Just---leave me alone.”

Mycroft Holmes swallowed hard. There would come a day he’d admit he never did a harder thing in all his life, nor felt more completely alone doing it. At that moment, though, all he felt was cold vacuum and the silence of despair. He nodded, once.

“Very well. As you wish. Goodbye, Sherlock.”

And he turned and left 221B, closing the door quietly behind him.

Only when his driver had brought him halfway back to his office, did he realize his hands were shaking.


End file.
